We’re living in a revolutionary situation. We could reformulate the classical definition in the following terms: the ruling elites of global capital cannot live as in the past; the workers, the precarious, the students, the poor, the living knowledge refuse to live as in the past. In the global crisis, the transnational struggles – from the North Africa insurrections to the acampadas in Spain or Syntagma Square, from the Chilean university movement to Occupy and the Québec uprising – are composed by the convergence of a downgrading middle class and a proletariat whose poverty is directly proportional to its productivity.

Articles on: The material substrate of networks; the Arab Spring; re-imagining mobile communications via encounters with a neolithic village; the 'freedom of movement and freedom of knowledge' events that have taken place between Spain and Morocco; utopias and political economies of networks, space and time; networks and health; networks and food; and Montréal residents' appropriation of train tracks.

Few books have provoked the kind of media hype, discussion and praise
that David Graeber's "'Debt: The Last 5,000 Years" has in the past few
weeks. DW looks at the movement and the man behind the book.

He doesn't stay in one place for long. One minute David Graeber is in
London, where he teaches anthropology at Goldsmith College, the next
he's in Frankfurt at Blockupy, then in Cologne and Berlin for book
releases, next stop New York. It's no wonder that Graeber is so busy:
He's published three books in 40 days.

This week’s latest reunion in Mexico of the G20 country-governments—that is to say, the ‘most advanced’ States within the global capitalist system—predictably continued in the tradition of mindlessness and unreason for which the transnational oligarchy should by now be well-known. Meeting in the luxury-resort town of San José del Cabo in Baja California Sur—a locale which, like Cancún in the Yucatan, effectively functions as a beachside colony for the most privileged, whether Mexican or foreign—the parties to the G20 merely worked to attempt to stabilize their dominion over the peoples of the world and non-human nature.

Inspired by the Institute for the Future of the Book, Minor Compositions is launching a digital form for the forthcoming book Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation by Neala Schleuning.

Everybody is now talking about the student debt crisis, but nothing is being done about itOccupy Student Debt

Thanks in large part to the great public amplifier of the Occupy movement, this year’s presidential contenders have been forced to embrace student loan reform as a talking point in their respective campaigns. But the debt relief being pushed by the Obama administration is a token gesture, aimed at getting some traction on the youth vote -- especially the more disillusioned or alienated student constituencies. Recent bills introduced in Congress -- Student Loan Forgiveness Act (H.R. 4170) and the Private Student Bankruptcy Fairness Act (H.R. 2028) -- have zero chance of passing in anything like their current form. Practically speaking, no reform program of any substance is on the legislative horizon, least of all one that would regulate the predatory lending practices of Wall Street banks.

The popular slogan “People before Profit” adopted by worker co-operatives begs the question how people, in this case members of worker co-operatives, can trump profit in a profit-driven economy. The predictable response is that the democratic organization of co-operatives, where decisions are guided by the interests of the members and not exclusively by the imperatives of capital, amply validates the truth of the slogan. But is this so? If the members of a worker co-operative democratically vote to cut their wages during an economic downturn, are they demonstrating their supremacy over capital? How does this decision, albeit arrived at democratically, significantly differ from a boss telling his staff that he regretfully needs to cut their salaries due to a lack of sales? Does collective decision-making become farcical because it is unable to challenge the ultimate power of capital?

• Are you researching Occupy or contemporary social movements?
• Are you involved in Occupy or other forms of activism?
• Are you interested in using research to take action towards creating other possible worlds?
• Are you keen on research which respects activism?

This one day convergence will focus on the ethics of researching within-and-beyond the Occupy movement. We would like this to be the beginning of an ongoing conversation about the ways in which research can complement, inform, challenge and present social movements and radical politics.

In the thirty years since Dick Hebdige published Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the seemingly antithetical worlds of punk rock and academia have converged in some rather interesting, if not peculiar, ways. A once marginal subculture documented in homemade ‘zines has become fodder for dozens of scholarly articles, books, PhD dissertations, and conversations amongst well-mannered conference panelists.

At the same time, the academic ranks have been increasingly infiltrated by professors and graduate students whose educations began not in the classroom, but in the lyric sheets of 7” records and the cramped confines of all-ages shows. And taking up the call to learn three chords and form a band, academics in recent years have extended DIY tactics into the academic world in terms of anything from autonomous publishing to free schools.

Come join us to celebrate the release of Punkademics, a collection of essays exploring the bastard convergences-mutations of punk rock and the academy.